America the Broken

[Geee]

Pajamas Media:

America is broken and it’s no consolation that the rest of the world is broken along with it. I had to laugh when I stumbled, while web surfing, on a 2007 United Nations ranking for Ireland — whose debt rating has just been slashed to junk — as the fifth best country to live in. If it is, we’re all in a heap of trouble.

For America is still Reagan’s shining light on the hill for everyone, like it or not. We are the daddy. We are the grown-up holding the world together. Everyone knows it even whey they lie about it or bemoan it. Only the grown-up is hurting now too. And the world is badly wounded because of it.

It is against this background that we watch with particular dismay, maybe closer to horror, the budget debate in Washington. Our country is being led by an individual seemingly incapable of thinking beyond his own interest or beyond an ideology as shopworn as a 1962 television set with a blown tube. Is there anybody left who still believes in Keynesian economics? I mean really believes in it with our now prodigiously escalating debt spiraling off into an unknowable future.

Well, our president appears to with his endless references to “fairness” — a fairness that most hurts the very people it pretends to help. Obama has trapped himself in a ideological oxymoron. He wants us to believe, wants himself to believe, that government is the solution when we all know that government is the problem. The more government tries to create jobs the worse the economy gets. The history of the twentieth century has demonstrated that for us from the Great Depression to the sorrow of the Soviet Union.